Ask anyone which senior high school track Filipino students pick most, and they will say STEM.
It is not close to true.
The biggest track is TVL — Technical-Vocational-Livelihood. Carpentry, cooking, welding, computer servicing, that sort of thing. It has 37.84 out of every 100 senior high students.
STEM has 9.02.
STEM is not even second. It is 4th out of 8.
And the smallest track, Maritime, has 503 students. In the whole country. In a country made of islands.
A Whole Level Of School That Did Not Exist
Here is the bigger story in this data.
Before 2016, Philippine schools stopped at grade 10. Then K-12 added grades 11 and 12.
In SY 2016-2017 senior high school opened with 731,981 students. Four years later it had 1,987,180.
That is a whole new layer of school, built from nothing, in four years. It is now 8.77 out of every 100 public school students.
They Hired A Lot Of Teachers
Over the 11 years in this file, the number of students went up 14.61 per cent.
The number of teachers went up 72.66 per cent.
That is 369,009 more teachers. Teachers grew 4.97 times faster than students did.
So classes got a lot less crowded. That is a real thing that happened, and it is not the story people usually tell about Philippine schools.
Except In One Place
Senior high school went the other way.
It opened with 19.9 students per teacher — better than any other level. Good start.
The next year, student numbers doubled. Teachers did not. It jumped to 29.57.
By the end it was 26.83. Getting better, but still worse than the day it opened.
Which makes sense when you think about it. You can plan a new school level. You cannot instantly make teachers who can teach welding, or accounting, or calculus to 17-year-olds.
Where You Live Still Matters
In BARMM, in Mindanao, there are 32.14 students per teacher.
In the Cordillera mountains up north, 20.46.
That is a gap of 11.68 students. Same country, same year, same government.
The Part That Bothers Me
Everything above counts children who are in school.
It cannot tell me anything about the ones who are not. Or about whether the ones who are there are learning anything.
So I went and got numbers that can.
8.55 out of every 100 children who start primary school do not finish it.
1,616,165 children of primary school age are not in school at all.
And in 2015 — the last year anyone measured it — only 65.56 out of every 100 secondary-age children were in secondary school.
Both things are true at once. The classrooms got less crowded, and a million and a half children are not in them.
One more thing: this file only counts public schools. About one in ten Filipino children goes to a private school, and none of them are in any number on this page.
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